A number of service industries in which a decorative or protective finish is applied to a surface employ an adhesive and/or sealant for that purpose. The adhesive and/or sealant must be spread uniformly as a thin coating on the surface. A particular industry with such a requirement is the installation of coverings on floors and/or walls. Coverings may be, for example, carpet, sheet plastic (e.g. vinyl), plastic tiles, ceramic tiles, composite strips and wood strips.
Adhesives and sealants are generally supplied in a variety of containers of the type also generally used for paints. Thus, small quantities of a liter or part liter are supplied in metal cans with press-on lids, while larger quantities, e.g. 20 or 40 liters, are supplied in small plastic drums with snap-on lids. Irrespective of the size of the surface that is to be coated, the usual method of application is for a quantity of the material to be poured onto the surface, if it is sufficiently easily flowable, or if too viscous to be poured easily, for small quantities to be scooped from the container and dumped on the surface. It is then spread uniformly by the operator, kneeling when the surface is a floor, employing for the purpose a metal or plastics hand tool of approximately rectangular shape, usually about 20 cm (8 ins) in width, the longer straight edge which engages the floor being toothed or serrated in a regular pattern so as to provide a row of uniform-size, uniformly-spaced gaps whereby corresponding uniform-size, uniformly parallel spaced lines of the adhesive are formed on the surface as the tool is dragged over it, the surplus material being pressed ahead of the tool and escaping around the edges. Such operations are labour-intensive and also tend to be somewhat messy unless the operator is particularly careful, especially as the container is emptied, when it becomes more difficult to extract the remaining material therefrom.
To mitigate against the problems in the art, there have been developed manually operable spreading apparatuses to assist in spreading flowable materials on to a surface. Such apparatuses are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,937,628 issued Aug. 17, 1999 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,325,563 issued Dec. 4, 2001, both in the name of William Matechuk. While these apparatuses are an improvement over the labour-intensive methods described above, there still remains a need for a spreading apparatus with improved spreading characteristics and improved ease of use.